Investigators find ActBlue donations inflated for many Wisconsin seniors

(The Center Square) – Two donors said they had never before made a political donation. Another said “look where I’m living” when asked if he made 7,878 donations worth $93,168.

And many more Wisconsin seniors confirmed they had not donated nearly as much as had been claimed in federal donation filings to ActBlue with the Federal Election Commission.

All of this came from multiple reports from a group of private investigators led by Kyle Corrigan of Brightline Investigations into Democratic fundraising platform ActBlue's political donations in Wisconsin that were shared with The Center Square.

Corrigan said the two reports – one in 2023, another in 2025 – were updates on an ongoing look into a practice referred to as “smurfing,” where the group is accused of attributing more donations and higher dollar amounts to individual donors than they actually gave in a process that can shield other donors from transparency.

Corrigan wrote in his report the donations could be qualified as both identity theft and money laundering in the state. He wrote that prior claims were sent to the Door County Sheriff’s Office in 2023 but were not investigated.

“Many of the donors have a high frequency of donations, but low donation amounts,” Corrigan wrote. “These types of financial transactions are often used in money laundering and identity theft crime rings to not arise suspicions with high dollar amount transactions. The victims are chosen carefully because their information is publicly available, and Act Blue already has it.”

ActBlue did not respond to a request for comment on the Wisconsin investigation. The reports were funded and sent back to several groups, including a 2023 report sent by Corrigan to Election Watch and Peter Bernegger and a second report that was sent to Daniel Eastman of Wisconsin Center for Election Justice, Stephen Einhorn with an informal group of five that called itself the voter integrity group, and now-U.S. Inspector General March Bell, who was then senior counsel to Republicans on the House Administration Committee working with Wisconsin Congressman Bryan Steil while working on an investigation into ActBlue.

Eastman's group is a 501(c)4 that files lawsuits related to voter issues in the state. He has separately represented Bernegger as a private lawyer.

Eastman said that his concerns with smurfing are wide-ranging, including how foreign influence could be involved in Wisconsin elections with foreign money funneled into ActBlue alongside donations attributed to Wisconsin seniors who did not actually donate the money.

Eastman wanted to find out if Wisconsin candidates are being chosen and funded by out-of-state and foreign interests.

"They’re so blatantly camouflaging candidates," Eastman said. "We don’t really know who the money is coming from."

Bernegger has testified about voting abnormalities in the state in front of a state committee related to the group’s findings and was convicted of bank and mail fraud in 2009.

Bell was confirmed in his role in the Trump administration on Dec. 22.

ActBlue donations have been the subject of several congressional hearings into both donations and the potential that foreign funds are being filtered into the organization, something the group initially denied in a hearing and then later declined to answer questions after a New York Times report about how the group filters foreign contributions.

The House Administration Committee has been investigating the group since 2023 and most recently requested documents from the organization's Board of Directors in early June.

“This is a legitimate investigation,” Corrigan said. “These are publicly available records that you can go corroborate on your own and we encourage people to do this.”

The FEC report for Appleton’s Mark Jennerjohn shows repeated small-level ActBlue donations but, when Corrigan said he interviewed Jennerjohn at his door, he scoffed and said “look where I’m living” about his small apartment and said that he donates $5 from time to time but the FEC numbers showing more than $90,000 in donations over a seven-year span were not something he could afford.

Corrigan said that, when explaining the potential issues, he tells donors not to trust him but to look at the FEC data as proof.

Corrigan said that he started with analysis of the data for all Wisconsin voters, including Republican donors.

“From what I’ve discovered over the years of doing this, the Republicans were involved with it as well on a small level as far as I understood these are donations that are being returned,” Corrigan said. “But they were 10-12 years behind Democrats with ActBlue and this entire scheme.

“It was a pretty ingenious thing to figure this out. So far we’re still sitting here talking about DOJ referrals and we have yet to see one and I’ve been working this case for the last three years.”

Henry Timm is a playwright living in Sister Bay who told Corrigan that he had never made a political donation, yet his name is on repeated ActBlue donations amounting to nearly $20,000.

“It is the perfect crime,” Corrigan said. “These people don’t check these records. Most people don’t check their FEC records. They’re not losing any money out of their bank accounts.”